Band week started yesterday and to celebrate I'm going to post videos from leadership retreat (I'll have a post about band week later today, but we are traveling back in time for now *plays twilight zone theme song*)!

This first one is Brenna jumping from the leap of faith. 

Note: She is fearless.

This next one is Dr. O.  I love the contrast of watching it next to Brennas video.  It's awesome.  

Note: He is a winner.
Also Note: The types of encouragement the leadership is giving him (what are we even saying?!), and how obvious it is that he wants it silent when he's on the pole.  You can see it in his face. c:

This last one is Dr. E.  He is also the best and it's an awesome video.

Note:  Fail. 

Thanks for reading/watching!


<3

Iota

The highlight of today was definitely the high ropes corse.  Here are just a bunch of pictures of us having a blast being at "summer camp."

Are these next two pictures of Dr. O?  Why yes, yes they are!  And, there will be wildly entertaining videos of both him and Dr. E tackling the ropes corse activities going on the blog tomorrow! 

We also did some music and marching, but is that what's really important?

Then we played some kick ball and Erin cheered like a beast while Brenna ran like a beast.

Oh, and Dr. O began his twirling career.  He will be famous one day.  It all started here folks. 

This was short and sweet, but we are having a blast (if you can't tell by all the pictures).  We'll be updating a lot more as the season really gets rolling.  Retreat is getting everybody excited for the new season, so bring it on band week! 


<3 

Iota

I believe some back-story is needed to really give you a true sense of what I’m calling “The Canopy Experience”. Last year at midsummer, one of the large projects assigned to us by the directors was to assemble four large canopies. These tent-like inventions were bought with the intention of providing shade on Edge Field. Long story short, there were a handful of us in TBS and KKY that ended up assembling and then de-assembling the canopies about 5 times due to a myriad of reasons. In the end, wind and other factors rendered the canopies so damaged, they were never used. Needless to say, we are not very big fans of these canopies.

Dr. Odajima recently notified us that he ordered new parts that are supposed to make the canopies sturdier (SURPRISE!). So, the few of us that are in town woke up early and began assembling the canopies (for what feels like the millionth time) at 8 a.m. this morning.

Sporting our excited canopy faces!

Breakfast of champions!! (...or mostly just Dr. E)

Dr. E explaining the straps that will supposedly make the canopies better (... or take longer to set up)

...And in traditional Iota/Beta Alpha fashion we had to start the morning off by breaking into the shed!

Step 1: remove the materials from the shed on Edge Field

Step 2: lay out the aluminum poles where they will be assembled

Step 3: Aluminum Skeleton

Step 4: Cover the skeleton in a big green tarp. This tarp is very easily blown up by the wind. Also, it was very difficult to secure the tarp to the skeleton because the elastic ties we used were just a little bit too small.

Step 5: Put on the legs so it stands!

Step 6: Nail pegs into the ground to hold the legs in place

Step 7: Stretch out the white straps and secure them in the ground with some fancy method that was only taught to a select few (according to Dr. E, if they were put in wrong, everyone will die…)

Step 8: Repeat

Hopefully the white straps will add the strength needed to keep the canopies from falling down this year. Tolerance, tempered with kindness was definitely the theme motivating me today. This whole process has been a little frustrating, but in the end these canopies will provide some much needed shade. Its been as hot as 108 degrees this summer; a dangerous temperature to be marching in. We will keep you all posted on the success of the canopies as the season progresses. You should all take a trip to Edge field to see the new pretty (and strong) canopies that adorn it.



(Has the semester started yet? Because it sure feels like we've been doing enough service for it to be the middle of the semester already.)  

<3 

Iota

PS - This was a guest post written by Brenna! Give her special props for being awesome and helping with canopies two years in a row and THEN reliving it via blog post! 

PPS - The girl in the Tweety Bird shorts is our president.  She's so cool. C: 

I promise I'll explain the title as I go, and once I do you'll realize it's pretty much perfect (or you'll continue to think we're all crazy).  c:  

We sent four people to national convention this year which was so awesome! We sent our normal delegate (Jeanne), and then we sent a group of three people to present for the Chapter Leadership Award that we were nominated for (Lauren, Brittany, and Heather).  When I say "we" sent four people to national convention I mean our joint account with Beta Alpha did - Thank you boys!  

So we left for convention around 1:30pm from Waco, TX - driving.  For those of you that don't know, convention this year was in Colorado Springs which is a 14 hour drive from Waco if you don't stop.  We were in a car with five people (we had the Kpsi - Beta Alpha delegate with us), that's five bladders with five different bathroom schedules and five tummies with five different eating schedules.  Needless to say we stopped A LOT to pee and eat.  

We still managed to make the trip fun by taking lots of pictures, finding the songify app (and rapping all the Tau Beta National Songs and the Baylor Fight Songs with the app - that was interesting), and singing as loud as we could with our headphones in to entertain each other.

After about 9 hours of driving we decided to work on the presentation for the Chapter Leadership Award.  Even though we found out about it so long ago (February...), we hadn't actually started working on it yet.  Brenna had very graciously spent about a week using all her fancy pants communications and speech skills actually WRITING the presentation, but none of us had done more than read over it maybe once (love you Brenna!).  We figured out of a five day convention there was no way the presentations would be on day one, and we only really needed one day to memorize the presentation.  Not even an hour into attempting to transfer the speech from the document on our phones onto notecards we get a call from Erika Pope (our favorite district counselor!).  Lauren was only on the phone with her for like 5 minutes, but when she hung up she informed us that the times for the presentations had been drawn and we were the next morning at 10:30am.  Uh Oh.  That gave us twelve hours to write it out and memorize it - if we decided not to sleep. 

The next time we saw a gas station we stopped for caffeine and stocked up.  Our schedule was as follows:

- Drive the remaining few hours to Colorado Springs
- Stay up until the speech was memorized
- Try to get to bed by 5am
- Wake up by 7:30am to register for convention!
- Buy more caffeine
- Take showers and look nice and ready to give a presentation
- Practice more
- Present 

We pulled into the hotel around 2am then had some room/key trouble and got settled in around 3am, and then we managed to stick to our schedule really well.  Jeanne and David (the Beta Alpha delegate) were troopers and stuck it out with us until 3:30am or so, but then needed sleep.

Unfortunately the next few days we looked like we were very sleep deprived...
... And that's when we all became twitter obsessed (#NatCon2011)

After the presentation was over we had time to get to some real TBS business!  

(1) Shenanigans.  We showed up a day late to convention, but caught on very quickly to 'shenanigans.'  At first every time something silly happened at one of the sessions one of the national officers would says "Shenanigans!"  Then slowly it went to be that every time ANYTHING happened it was just part of some Tau Beta shenanigan happenings.  It was crazy (or should I say cray cray?).  Someone kept a count going on the National Convention hash tag (#NatCon2011) and it ended up being well over a hundred.

(2) We got to interact with Erika Pope a lot!  We love her.  Love her.  Over the last couple of years it's been mostly Lauren (since she was president) getting to interact with Erika, but since so many of us were at convention we all got to know her a little bit.  She's a baller! 

(3) We elected our first man to national council at convention this summer (there's a little bit of history for those of you that were interested)!  This was actually really cool.  Being able to be a part of discussion for national elections made us feel so important! Jeanne and I were slightly partial to one of the candidates - Kevin Earnest.  He's amazing, and our new VPSP!  Everyone go look him up and tell him how awesome he is and that he is going to be great.  We were so partial to him in fact that we got a picture with him at Banquet.  He's going to make a great addition to the National council!

(4) We also got to spend lots of time with our past National Presidents from Iota - Janet and Karon.  They are amazing!  Getting to spend some quality time with them over those few days was a truly neat experience.  Having them around is such a great resource for us because there is so much we can learn from them! One of our favorite sessions was actually a past national presidents panel that they did, and we got to hear them talk about their time in the sisterhood.  

(5) AND WAVA BANES WAS THERE!!! She is a baller.  Ninety-one years old and rocking Tau Beta Sigma still!  She just showed up in the middle of one of our separate sessions to say hi.  She got like five standing ovations in the ten minutes she was actually in the room.  She is such a witty lady and you could tell even from just her time there that she didn't take anything from anyone.  I'm pretty sure everyone in that room wanted to be Wava Banes one day.  Oh and she read part of our ritual the next day. It was no big deal (I freaked out!!!). 

We also participated in the fight song competition on the last night of convention.  It was marvelous.  We didn't win, but in our hearts we did because we had SO much fun doing it!

I'm sorry this post was so long, but it was national convention! That's a whole week of stuff! They'll be shorter from now on I promise!

<3 

Iota

New Uniforms?! 

We unloaded about 34 boxes of these uniforms yesterday for about 4 hours, BUT we got to be the first to see the new BUGWB ... I mean.... Golden Wave Band uniforms (Wow, that was embarassing...) up close! I would write a whole bunch about this project, but really y'all just want to see what they look like.  

No capes this year, BUT! we have Baylor written across the back and the band logo on the sleeve which looks super sharp.  As far as Iota is concerned this means less pieces of the uniform for people to lose by the time we are checking them back in at the end of the year, and that is ALWAYS a good thing! 

Men's shoes

Women's Shoes

We're getting some baller Nike SWAG this year! Rumor has it that along with the awesome running shoes that we are using as marching shoes we are also going to be getting dry fit shirts and back packs (...and by "rumor" I mean I was told directly by the directors).  

Also, the men's shoes this year are the Nike+ shoes.  If you don't know what that is you should google it.  If you do know what that is - you are a runner or an avid Nike shoe buyer.  The women's shoes are not but are still super awesome looking.  However, I am a runner, so I made Nachelle sit at the computer and look up to see if there were any Men in band with a size 6.5 shoe that I could potentially trade.  She didn't find any, but she said there was one last year.  If you just so happen to be a guy in band with a 6.5 or 7 shoe size and want to trade a men's shoe for a women's I would do it! I'm only kind of kidding.  But not really.  c: 

Drum Major Uniforms

Also, the drum major's get gauntlets.  I needed a model for them because gauntlets just don't look as cool when they aren't on a person, so I recruited Taylor.  If you ever need a gauntlet model for anything (you know, like gauntlets) I would recommend her, she did a fabulous job and was mostly super cooperative! (Asking somebody to wear gauntlets with regular clothes for a picture to go on the internet is a little ridiculous and she was about as cooperative as I expected anybody to be.  Go Tay!)

I hope you like the new uniforms! I think the directors did an amazing job with the design!

<3 

Iota